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Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works is a monumental act of artistic daring, claiming for dance the right, and the ability, to bring one of the great voices in English literature to the stage. The translation from printed word to wordless movement is of necessity very free but McGregor’s profound respect for Woolf is evident at every moment of this shape-shifting triptych. Woolf Works should send every viewer back to her trailblazing novels.

Those who are acquainted at least in passing with Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and, to a lesser extent, The Waves, would get the deepest satisfaction from Woolf Works but no one could fail to be moved and excited. And not just by the dances. The Royal Ballet, which was last seen in Australia in 2002, has in its ranks some of the world’s most distinctive and dramatically alert dancers.

The Royal Ballet in Tuesday from Woolf Works. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Brisbane’s first cast – mostly the same as that in London’s 2015 premiere season – included Edward Watson, whose irretrievably broken soldier in the first part of Woolf Works was heart-stopping; Sydney-born Steven McRae, whose presence and speed were electric; Russian superstar Natalia Osipova, who had charisma to burn; and young principal Francesca Hayward, who darted and floated like a luminous dragonfly.

Above all Woolf Works had the apparently ageless Alessandra Ferri at its centre, as Clarissa Dalloway in the triptych’s first section and as Virginia Woolf in the third. She is still an extraordinarily eloquent dancer and, at 54, brought the wisdom born of experience to these stories of love, remembrance and loss. McGregor’s rigorous intellectualism was taken into another realm, that of deeply affecting emotional resonance.

Alessandra Ferri, centre, in Tuesday. Photo: Darren Thomas

Woolf Works begins with I now, I then, a distillation of Mrs Dalloway. A woman slides between present and past, remembering the joys and possibilities that have now evaporated. We see her glowing younger self (Beatriz Stix-Brunell), the man she might have married (Federico Bonelli) and the young woman she once kissed (Hayward). These shadows and reflections are seen more darkly in the figure of Septimus Smith, the soldier maddened by war. He too is haunted by thoughts of an unreachable ideal companion (Tristan Dyer).

On an austere set of revolving frames by Ciguë, illuminated softly by Lucy Carter’s elegiac lighting, memories float, intersect and dissipate. City sounds – bells, traffic, voices, the tick-tock of a day passing – waft through Max Richter’s superlative score.

McGregor’s choreography is delicate, restrained and very much on a human scale, even for Watson’s Septimus, whose anguish is palpable but tightly reined in. Richter’s music carries the load for him in huge sheets of dark sound, which retreat after Septimus and Clarissa have a moment together that isn’t in the novel but draws the threads together powerfully in the ballet (writer Uzma Hameed was the invaluable dramaturg).

Edward Watson in I now, I then. Photo: Darren Thomas

The wow factor is sky-high in the swaggering second section, Becomings, which takes a flying leap from the shoulders of Orlando into a sci-fi world of Carter’s restless lasers, Moritz Junge’s punk-Elizabethan costumes, Richter’s electronica and top-gear momentum. The dance captures the tumbling energy of Woolf’s writing and a sense of the novel’s race through time although little of Woolf’s witty view of sexual politics.

The speedy, stretchy physicality puts us in more conventional – for him – McGregor territory and the cast of 12 goes at it with ferocious attack. Dancers move in and out of hazy corners to offer a glimpse of Orlando in his/her journey through gender and the centuries. Osipova and McRae are the clear standouts, with McRae doing Olympics-standard higher and faster feats and Osipova stunningly authoritative. She might not entirely bring to mind Woolf’s charming poet, with his “eyes like drenched violets”, but her command is complete.

Natalia Osipova, left, in Orlando. Photo: Darren Thomas

The third section, Tuesday, contracts the multiple interior voices that intertwine in The Waves to a single viewpoint, that of the author as she chooses to end her life. Woolf wrote to her husband Leonard on a Tuesday, telling him how much happiness he had given her and that she could no longer go on. We had heard Woolf herself speaking at the beginning of the evening, in a BBC talk about language. In Tuesday her suicide letter is spoken beautifully in voiceover by Gillian Anderson as the work begins.

Dwarfed against a vast projection of breaking waves (film by Ravi Deepres) and enclosed in Richter’s heart-swelling score, Ferri as Woolf is buffeted by memories. This final short section is both itself and a circle back to the beginning: in an echo of I now, I then, a younger woman (Itziar Mendizabal) poignantly evokes a bright time when everything is still to come. In a further connection, Ferri is partnered tenderly by Bonelli, who gently lifts, tilts and sways her as if he were a ghost figure and she had already been claimed by the water. Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway, the creator and the created, are inseparable; indivisible perhaps.

A large corps of men, women and children comes and goes in surges like waves and flocks of birds but her aloneness is as complete as it is devastating.

Woolf Works ended on July 1 but more of the Royal’s exceptional dancers come to the Brisbane stage from July 5 in Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale. The Brisbane season marks the first time the Royal has performed Woolf Works and The Winter’s Tale outside the UK, for which much thanks. It’s much more common for a company to decide that international touring requires the safety net, yet again, of Swan Lake.

The Queensland Symphony Orchestra is in the pit, and was in mighty form when conducted by the Royal’s music director Koen Kessels for Woolf Works. Conducting duties for The Winter’s Tale will be divided between QSO music director Alondra de la Parra and Royal Ballet guest conductor Tom Seligman.

LUX Tenebris – Light in Darkness – is the name of Rafael Bonachela’s new work but it could well have been chosen to describe Sydney Dance Company’s new double bill as a whole. The company’s reprise of Alexander Ekman’s Cacti, which opens the evening, puts the audience in a happy, buoyant mood. Lux Tenebris then takes a violent journey into the shadows with extreme physicality and bruising encounters.

Bonachela has taken the gloves off with Lux Tenebris. It’s not often his company looks this wild and tough. As the work starts the dancers prowl around like feral cats, get into lightning-fast tussles with others and then do a runner. It ends that way too, everyone fleeing from something.

The title may suggest a dichotomy but Lux Tenebris operates almost entirely in the dark recesses of the mind. Illumination in a technical sense (Benjamin Cisterne designed) either flickers on and off nervily or is a crepuscular veil or cone. Where there is some light it seems to indicate a place to inhabit briefly then retreat from. Bonachela appears to have wanted to suggest balance between the two forces but Lux Tenebris has a mind of its own and makes a different call. It’s an unequal contest.

Charmene Yap and Todd Sutherland in Lux Tenebris. Photo: Peter Greig

The atmosphere is edgy and mysterious, created in no small part by the commissioned electronic score from Nick Wales that evokes the vastness of the universe as it buzzes, hums, clanks and drones. Again darkness predominates, although there are melodic chords suggesting chinks of light that insinuate themselves from time to time into the dense fabric.

(Speaking of fabric, the only misstep in Lux Tenebris is the costuming from Aleisa Jelbart, who puts some surprisingly daggy shorts and shirts on stage.)

The 40-minute work feels challenging and unsettling, despite the underlying formality of the structure that follows Bonachela’s penchant for series of solos (Juliette Barton’s, in which she appears to be trying to escape from herself, is magnificent), duos and groups. The only sense of real connection is in two incredibly close, sexy, needy duos from Charmene Yap and Todd Sutherland (both superb), and the lovely, momentary linking of the whole group in a line that soon disintegrates.

The dancers always look sharp but here sleekness gives way to ferociously strong and muscular attack. They need it for this hugely demanding work.

The evening starts with the return of Cacti, first danced by SDC in 2013. Ekman made it in 2010 as a riposte to pretentious critics – surely he had not yet experienced the clarity and wisdom of Australian reviewers – and the dance took off like wildfire. About 20 companies have it in their repertoire (Royal New Zealand Ballet has Cacti in its current season, Speed of Light, and National Ballet of Canada premieres it on March 9).

Sydney Dance Company in Cacti. Photo: Peter Greig

What’s in it for the audience? Happily Ekman turned his dismay at being misunderstood into a laugh-aloud funny jeux d’esprit that fizzes with energy, particularly in the goofy opening in which a string quartet wanders around playing Schubert amidst music hall-style clowning and complicated manipulations of small platforms. Ekman is even-handed enough to poke fun at the choreographic process too and a delightful time is had by all.

The choreographer raises fewer questions than he may think but I’m not going to argue with a piece this attractive and well made.

A version of this review first appeared in The Australian on March 2.

CounterMove ends in Sydney on March 12. Canberra, May 19-21. Melbourne, May 25-June 4. Regional tour of NSW, Queensland Northern Territory and Western Australia June 17-August 13.

POSTSCRIPT:

On the CounterMove opening night it was announced that Sydney Dance Company would take 2014’s Interplay on tour to Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, Chile and Argentina in April and May. In Europe the company is part of Dance Festival Steps, a multi-city biennial showcase for contemporary dance that this year also includes work from Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Wayne McGregor, Aakash Odedra with Rising, seen last year in Perth and Brisbane, and Huang Yi, whose Huang Yi and Kuka will be seen in Sydney in mid-March before its appearances at Dance Festival Steps. Sometimes the dance world can seem a rather small place.

Interplay is a terrific triple bill, the memory of which sent me back to my review of March 2014. Who knows? You may want to take a trip to one of the seven venues at which SDC is appearing. Well, you could go to one of six. The performance at Neuchâtel on April 23 is listed as sold out (the website is http://www.steps.ch).

The Australian, March 19, 2014

WHAT a rich, diverse evening. Sydney Dance Company’s Interplay offers three works, any two of which would have given a stimulating experience, but who’s complaining? Each makes a strong appeal to a different human need and shows the SDC dancers in shape-shifting, magisterial form.

Rafael Bonachela takes on Bach’s Violin Partita No 2 in D Minor for an intellectually challenging engagement between movement and music; the second new piece, Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim!, has heart and joy; and the revival of Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models well, that gives the libido a workout.

Sydney Dance Company in Raw Models, part of Interplay. Photo: Wendell Teodoro

Violinist Veronique Serret plays for Bonachela’s piece, called 2 in D Minor, planting her feet firmly on the stage and engaging fiercely with the dancers. Also on the program is new music from Stefan Gregory (invigorating, rhythmic tunes for L’Chaim!) and Nick Wales (intriguing electronic miniatures that act as contemporary interludes for in 2 in D Minor, based on Serret’s playing). This is a big, big show.

Bonachela’s piece doesn’t always rise to the complexities and nuances of Bach but has many luscious moments, particularly in sections involving Charmene Yap, David Mack and Cass Mortimer Eipper. On Monday night Yap embodied the music with alert, sinuous grace, frequently making eye contact with Serret, and David Mack and Cass Mortimer Eipper’s closely intertwined duo in the first movement also gave the sense of bodies merging with the music and emerging from it. There was a fine contrast in the second movement, Corrente, when Fiona Jopp’s lively solo was more external: a performance bubbling on top of the music.

As the piece progressed some of the dance material and structures lost their juice when familiarity set in. The solo interludes between movements were the surprise element, with white-clad figures offering present-day, somewhat anguished homage to Bach. These interpolated pieces were danced on a square of light on the stage, mirroring the skylight-like light that hovered above the Bach movements. (Benjamin Cisterne created the set and lighting.) I couldn’t help but think these little dances referred to the noble struggle involved in living up to the genius of Bach.

When Raw Models premiered in 2011 I was struck by the various meanings of the word model it evoked: fashion, mechanical device, computer modelling. This time the piece felt a little different. Overall there isn’t quite the level of chic and haughty sheen the original cast brought to it but it is still very sexy. The ripples, poses and elongations of seven dancers dressed in skin-tight black bring to mind the enacting of a creation story or perhaps, given the gloom and frequent blackouts, rebirth from a catastrophe.

Whatever it is, it’s happening in a galaxy far, far away. These superb physical specimens may look human but could well be aliens from the planet Glamour Major. The opening night crowd went wild, particularly (and rightly) for Yap’s knockout duo with Andrew Crawford, a man with the wingspan and majesty of a golden eagle, both of which he puts to excellent use in Raw Models (Crawford is unfortunately no longer with SDC).

Where Raw Models demonstrates the vast gulf between elite performers and their audience, L’Chaim! seeks connection. Folk dancing is the choreographic impulse and the illustration of community. A disembodied voice (that of Zoe Coombs Marr, text is by David Woods) asked company members questions – some banal, some impertinent, some useful – about themselves and what they felt about dancing. The idea is an extension of a long-running interest Obarzanek has in why people dance and what dance means, and there is a work of greater depth there for the taking. L’Chaim! is already an endearing addition to the inquiry.

Wearing a motley array of ordinary clothes, the full SDC company beautifully illustrated how highly trained bodies can move in ways denied the rest of us. Then, as they almost imperceptibly let go of their technique, they movingly showed how a civilian may be absorbed into the dance.

Footnote: for the European performances Serret will once again be the violin soloist for 2 in D Minor and Obarzanek will take on the role of the interrupting actor in L’Chaim!

DANCE is my great passion but this year there wasn’t a huge amount to bowl me over.Certainly I saw plenty of fine dancing – when does one not? – but in classical ballet there were few new works of substance. Well, none actually. There were pleasing new versions of existing ballets, although they didn’t quite make it to the list. New versions of oft-told stories is business as usual for ballet.

In Sydney there were new contemporary works I failed to see because the seasons were so short – this city isn’t exactly dance central – but there were a couple of new (or newish) pieces that added some excitement. Happily I was able to travel a bit and that helped me see enough to constitute what I might consider a quorum for a list of notable productions. If I saw it in this country I’ve included it, which is why American Ballet Theatre and Trisha Brown Dance Company appear alongside the locals.

As in my earlier posts looking back on 2014, works are mentioned in the order in which I saw them. There is a supplementary international section at the end. I intend to do a separate post on the men and women of the year so if someone rather than something appears to be missing, they may well be mentioned tomorrow.

DANCE WORKS OF NOTE IN 2014

Am I, Shaun Parker & Company, Sydney Festival and Sydney Opera House (January): A strong addition to this meticulous choreographer’s body of work. It looked and sounded stunning. Nick Wales, who has worked many times with Parker, contributed a new score full of fascinating colours, rhythms and sonorities, played and sung by a group of seven musicians. Meticulous, elegant and sophisticated, Am I ambitiously took ideas from physics, astronomy, neurology, anthropology and other branches of science to chart the path of human development. We are the only creatures who can apprehend ourselves as conscious beings with a limited span. Having evolved to that point, our drive is to survive and replicate, to make love and war, and to think about things too much.

Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku, Sydney Festival (January): Dalisa Pigram is a passionate advocate for life in Australia’s north-west. She wove a memorable solo from themes relating to the area’s indigenous history, polyglot population, environmental beauties and present-day challenges. Simultaneously wiry and elastic, Pigram seamlessly incorporated shapes from indigenous dance, martial arts, animal imagery, gymnastics, the nightclub and the circus for a wholly individual effect. When she spoke in her traditional language, Yawuru, it became a liquid element in Sam Serruys’s score, which also included songs from Stephen Pigram.

Interplay, Sydney Dance Company (March): The triple bill of Rafael Bonachela’s 2 in D Minor, Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models and Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim! made a cracking evening. Bonachela’s take on Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor was an intellectually challenging engagement between movement and music; the second new piece, Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim!, had heart and joy; and the revival of Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models – well, that gave the libido a workout.

Chroma, The Australian Ballet (April): Wayne McGregor’s Chroma wasn’t as brilliantly danced as it can be when I saw it but it’s a tremendous work. In seven swiftly moving, grandly conceived scenes the choreographer captures on the dancer’s body some of the myriad neural impulses that make it move, think and feel. Undulation, distortion and hyper-extension are a big part of the movement language but we can also see fragments of the classical ideal shimmering through Chroma. The juxtapositions are absorbing: small and large, inner and outer, action and repose, contemporary and traditional, the body and the space it occupies. Also on this generous quadruple bill, Jiri Kylián’s Petite Mort. The AB always does Kylián well and in Petite Mort there is so much to love: men with fencing foils, intimations of darkness and some outstandingly sexy dancing with lots of little orgasmic shudders.

Patyegarang, Bangarra Dance Theatre (June): The story of Lieutenant William Dawes and young indigenous woman Patyegarang in colonial Sydney should be better known. In the tumultuous first years of white settlement, as the British colonisers imposed themselves and their culture on what is now the glittering city of Sydney but was then the Eora nation, Dawes studied and recorded the local language. Patyegarang appears to have been his most important teacher. Stephen Page turned this rare and precious relationship into an impressionistic, meditative work.

The Arrangement, Australian Dance Artists (July): This little jewel could be seen by invitation only, and I was one of the lucky ones. Prime mover was artist Ken Unsworth, who may be in his ninth decade but has lost none of his zest for the complexities of human existence, often casting an absurdist eye on events. He made a cameo appearance at the beginning of The Arrangement to usher in a series of scenes connected not by any narrative but by themes of love, longing, the passage of time and the cycle of life. The mature ADA dancers were former London Contemporary Dance Theatre artists Anca Frankenhaeuser and Patrick Harding-Irmer and Sydney Dance Company alumni Susan Barling and Ross Philip. The Song Company sang texts by A.E. Houseman, Federico Garcia Lorca, W.H. Auden, Barnabe Googe and Rainer Maria Rilke to Jonathan Cooper’s commissioned music, and it was all very fine indeed. Unsworth finances ADA productions entirely – a great labour of love.

Keep Everything, choreographed by Antony Hamilton for Chunky Move (August): There wasn’t much that was more fun than this. A stage strewn with trash, three incredibly virtuosic and multi-skilled performers, a race through the human story from pre-history to the stars and back again and plenty of stimulating ideas along the way.

American Ballet Theatre, Brisbane (September): Forget Swan Lake; the Three Masterpieces program was the one to see. Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free was highly enjoyable, but the real treats were Twyla Tharp’s Bach Partita, which was recently revived by ABT after a 28-year hiatus, and Alexei Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas. Glorious works both.

Trisha Brown Dance Company, Melbourne Festival (October): Trisha Brown was a leading figure in the post-modern dance movement in New York and her influence runs deep. The survey of her work at the Melbourne Festival showed exactly why, but it was far from a history lesson or an academic exercise. Brown’s intellectually rigorous and highly technical dance-making is deeply concerned with the physics and geometry of the body and its relation to the space in which it moves, and her purpose is not to mimic or evoke emotional states. Yet the varied program demonstrated one quality above all that animates the work: intense, soul-filling joy.

The Nutcracker, The Australian Ballet (November): Peter Wright’s version of The Nutcracker is frequently said to be the most beautiful in existence, and there is a lot of competition. When I see Alexei Ratmansky’s newish production for American Ballet Theatre I’ll get back to you on who is the winner. But quibbles aside, this certainly is a sumptuous-looking production, even if it looks rather cramped on the stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. Even better, it touches the heart.

INTERNATIONAL NOTES:

A highlight of my New York visit early this year was finally getting to see the Jerome Robbins masterpiece Dances at a Gathering, a suite of dances to Chopin piano pieces that has no narrative but is full of connections between the dancers. To see it performed by the company for which it was made in 1969 was a dream come true.

On an all-Balanchine bill at New York City Ballet, Concerto Barocco (1941), was a revelation. Made to the music of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, Concerto Barocco is said to mark the first appearance of Balanchine dancers in practice clothes, something that would become a feature of many works. Here the women are all in white, with a little skirt. Eight women who form a kind of chorus of handmaidens, two principal women and one man move in unison, canon, mirror one another, and enter and leave in response to the music. Poetry and harmony reign and the detail is delicious: at one point the solo man is gently entangled in a thicket of the supporting women; at another he turns a simple promenade of his partner into courtly admiration. Just lovely.

THE Australian Ballet has designated 2015 its Year of Beauty, driving the point home with sumptuous imagery. Not since 2009 has the AB’s promotional material had such a romantic feel.

The program, announced on September 16, culminates in a new production of Sleeping Beauty, to be staged by AB artistic director David McAllister, and begins with a Sydney-only revival of Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake. In between are Maina Gielgud’s much-admired production of Giselle, a program of Frederick Ashton works and a Melbourne-only revival of Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella. There is just one contemporary program, 20:21, and a stripped-back version of the new choreography showcase Bodytorque.

In a particularly busy year the AB will appear in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide (twice), Perth, Canberra and Brisbane (although the latter gets only a single outdoor concert) and also visits Beijing and Shanghai.

Last week David McAllister spoke in detail about his choices and his plan to increase the size of the company from 72 to 85 dancers.

DJ: The 2015 season could be described as highly traditional. Are audiences becoming more conventional in their tastes?

DMcA: This year the contemporary program actually outsold everything. Everyone loved Chroma [the mixed bill headlined by Wayne McGregor’s Chroma]. In fact, I was thinking of calling everything Chroma! But a couple of years ago, when we were doing a business plan, I sat down with the dancers and said, “In five years’ time what do you want this company to look like?” The feedback I got was really interesting. We have this motto, “Caring for tradition, daring to be different”, and the dancers said to me loud and clear they felt we were too daring and not caring enough with the repertoire. They want to be doing more of that repertoire they feel is important to them as ballet dancers. So I said okay. I took it on board.

If you look at this year’s repertoire as well as next year’s it does have a bit more of a heritage feel. If they want to be doing that work, I want to do it for them. Equally, there have been irons in the fire for a number of years. Originally we were going to do Giselle last year but then Paris Opera Ballet announced they were coming [to Sydney with Giselle]. So that fell into 2015. It’s been way too long out of the repertoire. It’s great to get Maina’s production back.

Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, which premiered in 2002 and has been rarely out of the repertoire, will be seen in Beijing in October and have a commercial season in Sydney.

That’s exactly what it is [commercial]. That’s something the board has wanted us to do; the board have kept on at us about why haven’t we been more commercial with our seasons. The dates that we [were going to have] in Brisbane were gobbled up by Wicked so we had two weeks available, there were two weeks at the Capitol [in Sydney] and bingo.

Normally in Sydney we have the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra but they are with Opera Australia at that time [February] so we have to factor in the orchestra as a cost. But now that we have an orchestra [the AB recently took over management of Orchestra Victoria] we can bring them up. It’s exciting.

Beijing particularly asked for Swan Lake. It’s opening the dance festival at the National Centre for the Performing Arts [in October 2015]. They wanted our big international success. There will also be a mixed program – Suite en Blanc, [Stephen Baynes’s] Unspoken Dialogues and [Twyla Tharp’s] In the Upper Room.

In Shanghai we’ll do Cinderella and the mixed bill.

Is there a danger of The Australian Ballet appearing to be a one-trick pony with the many repeats of the Murphy Swan Lake?

We’re negotiating to go back to London and they are asking us to bring Swan Lake again. In 2005 it was compromised [the AB season started only days after terrorist bombings in London]. It’s still got currency. I’m cognisant that we shouldn’t do it too often, but it hasn’t been seen in Sydney since 2008. That’s coming on for seven years. The company looks so good in it; it’s in their DNA.

The Ashton program will be seen in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. It features The Dream, which gives its name to the program, plus Monotones II and Symphonic Variations.

The Ashton program has been in and out of planning for the last four years. I finally managed to nail it. The Dream is such an amazing, beautiful ballet, and we haven’t done any Ashton now for 10 years. We did La Fille mal gardee in 2004. The last time we did The Dream was 1980. Symphonic’s never been done. Monotones was done in 1991 and we did Birthday Offering in the 90s. Les Patineurs was even earlier – before I joined the company. There’s a real gap in our Ashton repertoire, and because it played such an important part in the formation of the company I felt it was time to get a bit of Ashton happening again.

Chengwu Guo and Madeleine Eastoe, The Dream. Photo: Georges Antoni

I know Dame Peggy van Praagh wanted the company to do Symphonic but Ashton wouldn’t let anyone much do it except for the Royal Ballet. I really wanted it. [Rights owner] Wendy Somes and I have been having these discussions and I was thrilled she thought it would be good for us to do it.

The Ashton style – lyrical, with luxurious and expressive use of the upper body and filigree footwork – is notoriously difficult.

I saw the Royal do Scènes de ballet and remember watching it and saying, “Now I know what the Ashton style is, and the RB do it like no one else. They were unbelievable. The use of body, that quickness of the footwork. It was so beautiful. I thought, “It’s going to be really good for us to attempt that. It is very different to what we do so it will be interesting to have that challenge. We’re going to send some of the principals over to work with Anthony Dowell [who owns the rights to The Dream and who is unable to travel to Australia to stage the ballet]. We wanted him to come out, but he can’t.

McAllister felt the company needed a new Sleeping Beauty. Stanton Welch’s 2005 production had two sell-out seasons and covered its costs in the first season, but was considered flawed in some respects. It will not be revived.

We needed to do another Sleeping Beauty. I could have brought in a production – Marcia Haydee’s, or Peter Wright’s. Then I thought, maybe I should have a crack at it. Why not? In my career I’ve always thrown myself in at the deep end. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. I’m seeing my production in the way Maina approached hers and Peggy approached hers. There will be choreography and I will be choreographing, but in the style of Petipa and embroidering what the existing choreography is. That’s why I’m not crediting myself as a choreographer. I’m a curator, I guess, of Petipa’s choreographic input. It’s exciting. It is an apprenticeship, seeing all of those productions I’ve commissioned in my time and being in all those productions in the past. Watching Alexei creating Cinderella last year was just amazing. Being in the studio with Graeme and Janet [Vernon] when they did Swan Lake and Firebird and Nutcracker – you get a sense of what you like, what you don’t like. If I’d commissioned someone to do a Sleeping Beauty I would have annoyed the shit out of them.

Lana Jones, Sleeping Beauty. Photo: Georges Antoni

The one contemporary program, 20:21, offers George Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements, a revival of Tharp’s In the Upper Room and a new work from resident choreographer Tim Harbour. It will have unbroken seasons in Melbourne and Sydney, despite the success this year in Sydney of what McAllister calls his “zipper”, two programs in repertory sharing the season of 20 performances. Did the zipper not work?

It went off like a frog in a sock. Played to 93 per cent capacity over the whole season. We were desperately trying to do it again this year. When the Brisbane dates fell out [due to Wicked] it all went in a heap. We were going to do 20:21 and Ashton in a zipper but didn’t have time to get it up for Sydney. [The logistics are complicated, but essentially a Brisbane season would have allowed some of the work to be rehearsed and performance-ready earlier in the year.] The zipper’s going to come back in 2016. The thing is having two mixed programs that are quite different. [This year’s] Ballet imperial was so different to Chroma. That’s the plan going forward. But we have to have something in the bag or premiere it somewhere else for it to work. In 2016 we can do it without compromise. It’s a great concept.

Has Bodytorque been pushed aside?

We sandwich Bodytorque in wherever we can. It’s never really had a home. It did [physically] in the Sydney Theatre but sometimes it was in October, sometimes in May, wherever we could shove it. Next year, the Canberra time just ate the Bodytorque opportunity. I didn’t want to lose it completely, so said let’s think creatively about how we can have Bodytorque humming along. I got the idea for the up-late, pop-up Bodytorque. As with the 50th anniversary year [in 2012], I couldn‘t find space for it. It tends to be the first thing that drops off. It was a bit the same this year, but I said, no, we’re not going to give it up. It will be in both the 20:21 and Dream programs as an add-on after performances.

How does it work? It will be on the stage. We’ll invite the audience to stay. We’re still working through the logistics. I think we will be in touch with people who will be in the audience on the nights we’re doing it and ask them to register. Then we’ll know how many people will be there. We will also build a Bodytorque group – groupies – through social media networks. Those people will just turn up for the [Bodytorque] show and then we might have a bit of a drink afterwards. There will be just one 15-minute piece.

The Australian Ballet nominally has 72 dancers, although in practice usually 69 or 70. McAllister wants to increase that to 85 by 2017.

It’s to enable us to do other things – children’s ballet for instance. We’ve been talking about this for two years. Every time we get to the logistics of staging it we can’t do it. In 2016 and 2017 we’re hoping to add eight and then seven into the company. It’s primarily to work on the kids’ ballet, regional touring and the choreographic program. But I don’t want to start AB II. That’s not what we want. It just gives us a bit more flexibility. We’re not going to be staging two seasons at the one time. Well, we’ll be doing a kids’ ballet while we’re doing mainstage, but we’re not trying to double our coverage. This is a way of extending our reach and giving our dancers a little bit of breathing space. We do a lot of shows and the dancers are highly worked. And I want to be able to field 24 swans in Swan Lake and 24 Shades in Bayadere without having to employ [extra] people, which we currently do. We want a company closer in size to the Royal Ballet.

Next year McAllister will overtake Maina Gielgud as The Australian Ballet’s longest-serving artistic director – she reigned for 14 years – and is contracted until 2017.

What happens then? I don’t know. I’ve been very honest with the board. I’ve said I don’t see this job as a right. I’m well aware of the length of my service. They’ve said they are very happy with what I’m doing. We’ll keep the dialogue going.

THE founders of BalletBoyz, Royal Ballet alumni Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, have one of the best contact books in the business. A program that offered new choreography by Russell Maliphant and Liam Scarlett stamped itself as a must-see: the work of a contemporary master alongside the UK’s most feted young classical dance-maker. The fact that Scarlett’s piece turned out to be less than riveting was in an odd way a positive experience, at least for me. The 27-year-old is being talked up extensively, particularly in the UK press, so it was good to be able to see for oneself.

Liam Scarlett’s Serpent. Photo: Michele Mossop

In my case I was taking a second look at Scarlett’s work as earlier this year I caught Scarlett’s relatively new commission for New York City Ballet, Acheron. I was not exactly bowled over. In what is becoming quite a Scarlett-fest, I will see his take on Jack the Ripper, Sweet Violets, with the Royal Ballet when I’m in London next week; reviews weren’t entirely positive when it premiered in 2012 although they were supportive. Reviews of this revival, just out, suggest Scarlett has done some work on this one-act narrative piece but that it remains a bit over-stuffed.

Dance writers seem desperate to find a new young choreographer who works in the classical idiom without distorting it in the ways Wayne McGregor and, to a lesser extent, Christopher Wheeldon are seen to do. Scarlett has clearly been nominated as the great hope. (When Sweet Violets premierered it was on a bill with McGregor and Wheeldon, as it happens.)

There is something of a backlash at present against what is seen as extreme manipulations of the body in the work of McGregor and Wheeldon, particularly the manipulation of women. This is a relevant area of interest and concern, although it won’t help the art form or Scarlett if Scarlett is over-praised too early in his career as the one who can save ballet from this direction.

I hope he can take the pressure. Scarlett is being picked up by classical companies around the world and there isn’t a lot of competition in his category. Everything he does is watched very closely.

But back to the BalletBoyz. There was an extra degree of difficulty to add interest in this company as Nunn and Trevitt were exclusively working with men aged between 18 and 25 who come from diverse dance backgrounds or, in the case of one member, no dance training at all. The Talent is about expanding chances for men to dance and sharing the joy as widely as possible.

In Serpent Scarlett went for flowing, introspective movement that incorporates several striking images but offers little sense of purpose. A man lifted out of a tight group then absorbed back into it, a solo figure breaking away from the pack, one still man in profile as the others move – these showed Scarlett’s ability to make a fine moment but overall the piece felt soppy despite the men’s muscularity, aided in this by Max Richter’s soft-centred score that includes the sound of water falling. I thought of gently wafting seaweed rather than sexy, sinuous, dangerous snakes. Not terribly interesting.

I discovered later that there were nine men on stage instead of the 10 mentioned in the pre-show videos because one was ill. The works had been rearranged to go on without him. Were some of the images I admired in the Scarlett the result of an odd number of performers on stage – as in the one still man in profile? I do hope not. It would make Serpent even less interesting.

Maliphant’s Fallen was thrilling, as expected. It uses traces of folk imagery, intimations of martial activity and wonderful lifts and falls that have a hallucinatory quality. Michael Hulls’s lighting was a forceful character in itself and Armand Amar’s rumbling score, while perhaps bringing a Jason Bourne film too frequently to mind, supported the action well.

As Maliphant tactfully put it in a short introductory film, he was working with a group of people with different skill sets. Yes, some of the young men were slightly more polished than others but in Fallen, each immersed himself to the hilt and each looked right at home.

LET’S start with the very best bit first. The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra had a particularly good night on Tuesday under Australian Ballet music director Nicolette Fraillon’s leadership. The quadruple bill Chroma covers a lot of ground: Mozart for Jiri Kylian’s Petite Mort and Sechs Tanze, Tchaikovsky’s homage to Mozart for a new piece by Stephen Baynes and Joby Talbot’s White Stripes-inspired score, written in 2006 for the Wayne McGregor work that gives this program its title.

Talbot’s music is gorgeously textured and richly coloured as well as providing a super-solid yet flexible base for McGregor’s out-there movement. It rocks and it rolls, often luxuriously and lyrically, and the AOBO conveyed the excitement and tension. The Kylian works are performed to Mozart’s Six German Dances and the sublime slow movements from his piano concertos numbers 21 and 23 (at the first performance the AB’s principal pianist Stuart Macklin was the fine soloist), and as a bonus Fraillon threw in the allegro first movement from Mozart’s Divertimento in D to provide a lively entr’acte between the two short Kylians.

McGregor’s piece is not without intimations of human connection but they are fleeting and enigmatic, as is so much else. In seven swiftly moving, grandly conceived scenes the choreographer captures on the dancer’s body some of the myriad neural impulses that make it move, think and feel. Undulation, distortion and hyper-extension are a big part of the movement language but we can also see fragments of the classical ideal shimmering through Chroma. The juxtapositions are absorbing: small and large, inner and outer, action and repose, contemporary and traditional, the body and the space it occupies.

On Tuesday night the AB cast of 10 didn’t entirely get on top of Chroma’s fantastically difficult transitions, many happening in a microsecond, from crisp to liquid and back again. There wasn’t enough bite and drama, although plenty of lovely moments in a work that repays repeated viewings. Andrew Killian, Brett Chynoweth and Christopher Rodgers-Wilson had plenty of attack in the fierce trio in the middle of the work and Amber Scott and Adam Bull gave a beautiful account of the quiet pas de deux that immediately follows.

Petite Mort and Sechs Tanze were given rousing performances on Tuesday, possibly a little over the top in Sechs Tanze but in keeping with its gaiety in the face of whatever the fates decree. Four couples, dressed in what look like 18th century undergarments, engage in lots of horseplay, bouncing and jumping in unexpected, often surreal, but very playful ways. They could be servants breaking loose while the master is away, perhaps. There is certainly an undercurrent of trouble. The piece is introduced with the sound of thunder and at the end, when the music stops, the men and women retreat a little fearfully – an aspect of the work not fully brought out at this performance.

Despite one or two scrappy moments Petite Mort (performed before Sechs Tanze) again demonstrated the AB’s affinity for Kylian. In this ballet rousing is indeed the mot juste, as the title is a euphemism for orgasm. There are men with fencing foils, women in corsets, intimations of darkness and some outstandingly sexy dancing with lots of little orgasmic shudders.

In the middle came Baynes’s new Art to Sky. At its premiere it felt uncertain in tone and looked uninspiring in construction. There was a main man (Andrew Killian), a woman who seemed to represent a romantic ideal (Madeleine Eastoe, wasted) and a ballerina with a tiara (Lana Jones), but little sense of tension or compelling purpose. Elements of jocularity emerged that had the audience tittering a little unsurely and that felt unmotivated. Perhaps it would have been better to revive one of Baynes’s earlier one-act ballets, of which there are many stronger examples.

The costumes and set for Art to Sky do not help matters – there is a kind of grotto effect and most of the dancers are dressed as if in very neat practice gear. Hugh Colman, responsible for both aspects of the design, appeared to be having a very rare off day. Only days before Chroma I admired Colman’s charming design for Queensland Ballet’s Coppelia and he is also the designer of the glamorous tutus for Ballet Imperial, part of the Imperial Suite program that is in repertory with Chroma.

The decision to have two mixed-bill programs rather than the usual one would appear to be a very good one. It’s hard to sell 20 performances of anything other than a known story ballet, so to divide the season between Chroma and Imperial Suite could pay dividends. If audiences aren’t attracted by the likes of McGregor and Kylian, there’s the classical double of Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial and Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc to offer a big tutu fest.

AS the curtain came down on Lucinda Dunn’s farewell performance for The Australian Ballet she wept, the streamers flew, the audience roared and an era ended. Dunn has been with the AB for 23 years, longer than any other ballerina, and was a principal artist for more than a decade.

As she danced the title role in Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon she looked as if she could dance for another 23 years, so immaculate was her artistry and technical command. But she is 40 in an art form that exacts a brutal toll on bodies. As much as balletomanes would wish it otherwise, she had to choose a moment to call it quits.

Lucinda Dunn and Adam Bull in Manon

Dunn did it while at the pinnacle of success and with her formidable gifts intact. She has long been the AB’s prima ballerina, the best of the best. That’s why fans queued in the dawn light (or earlier) on the day of her last show to secure standing room tickets, and why there was a lengthy line for box office returns in the evening. There were doubtless few. The Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House was, of course, over-flowing.

That Dunn has had a special relationship with her audience was borne out by the long and tumultuous ovation she received. As she waved goodbye, many in the house tearfully waved back. Dunn has been an old-school star, always dressed immaculately to greet her fans and conscious of her obligations. She has given them great respect and they have loved her in return. Dunn was officially recognised this year when awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia.

Dunn had all the major classical works in her repertoire, having a particular triumph as Aurora in Stanton Welch’s version of The Sleeping Beauty when the AB toured to ballet-mad Tokyo in 2007. The role of Clara in Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker – The Story of Clara was one of Dunn’s favourites and she was superb in contemporary work as well. There was nothing she couldn’t tackle with distinction as she proved last year when appearing in works by George Balanchine and Wayne McGregor, choreographers who could not be more different.

She was fortunate, too, in having one of ballet’s holy grails: she shared with Robert Curran, who became a principal artist on the same day as Dunn, a long and exceptionally fruitful artistic relationship. Curran retired from the AB in 2011 with a reputation as a stellar partner.

Lucinda Dunn and Robert Curran in The Nutcracker. Photo: Jim McFarlane

Dunn has been a role model for younger dancers in many ways, but perhaps none more potent than her return to performing at the highest level after two periods of maternity leave. Dunn’s husband, Danilo Radojevic, brought young daughters Claudia and Ava onstage to share Dunn’s final moments as a dancer.

Dunn’s retirement doesn’t end her association with ballet. She was recently announced as artistic-director designate of the Tanya Pearson Classical Coaching Academy and Sydney Youth Ballet. She takes up the position on January 1.

The night before Dunn farewelled an audience that didn’t want to let her go, Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg were guest artists in Manon and showed a wildly appreciative full house why they form one of ballet’s most treasured partnerships.

As leading dancers roam the globe to work with different companies, the building of a special artistic relationship that endures and deepens is increasingly rare and precious. At the most fundamental level Cojocaru and Kobborg look as if they belong together, as if they are constantly drawn to one another and that they understand one another profoundly. They undoubtedly do, as they are also offstage partners, but such a relationship doesn’t necessarily translate to the stage.

It did here. Myriad piquant individual details within a seamless overarching interpretation built a picture of a steadfast, deeply anguished lover and a sweetly innocent woman whose sensuality is awakened and is her downfall. It was fascinating to see Cojocaru transformed by Manon’s initiation into sexual delights. She danced as if in a dream, quietly intoxicated. The sumptuousness of her upper body was exquisite, yet there always remained something of the youthful radiance of the girl who rushed into a courtyard to spend time with her brother before she entered a convent.

The artistry was of the highest order. Those audiences lucky enough to see one of Kobborg and Cojocaru’s two performances with the AB were greatly blessed.